Cloud Tools: Cloud Studio

Amazon ships a handful of tools to use EC2 and S3. There are some freely downloaded scripts that make life a bit easier. Personally, I want to use a GUI. I use SSH enough when I connect remotely. If I’m in Windows, I want a windows tool.

Today I downloaded Cloud Studio from Cloud Services, Ltd. Cloud Studio is an free S3 browser with a little bit of EC2 support. It’s a version 1.0 product so you can’t expect too much. According to the site:

Cloud Studio is a visual tool designed to make the development of applications for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) more convenient. Developers (or someone responsible for applications deployment) can effortlessly create and destroy instances, manage security groups, keypairs, and allocate and assign IP addresses.

User can choose to run Cloud Studio as a traditional standalone application, or to use it as an extension to Eclipse IDE, which is currently one of the most widely used application development environments featuring support for Java, C/C++, PHP, and other programming languages.

The interface is extremely easy to use. It has a three pane window. Upper left is an AMI browser, upper right is a pane with a set of tabs showing configuration information. The bottom pane is the most useful with an instance monitor, an S3 browser and a progress tab (that shows outstanding tasks).

The instance monitor show any currently running instances. If you right click on an instance, you can terminate or reboot it. You can also associate an elastic IP to the instance.

The S3 browser is the most functional in the program. At the right is a drop down list and a series of icons. The drop down list lets you select a top level bucket. The icons, in order, allow you to get file properties, create a new bucket, delete a bucket, upload a file and refresh the screen. The final two icons are on all the panes and allow you to minimize or maximize a pane. If you right click on a file, you can choose to download the file.

That’s about it. It’s a very simple program but it does exactly what it advertises to do. I like it. I’ll be trying other tools as I find them but for now, Cloud Studio is a part of my cloud computing toolbox.